In 1945, Muhammad Ali al-Samman, unearthed a red earthenware jar in Upper Egypt, and hoping to find gold, smashed it, and discovered thirteen papyrus books, bound in leather. The Nag Hammadi texts consists of some fifty-two texts from the early centuries of the Christian era, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel to the Egyptians, the Secret Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Apocalypse of Peter.
These gnostic writings were rejected by the early church because they fundamentally undermined the unique event of the incarnation of God in Christ and its significance for humanity. Gnosticism held that matter was impure and only spirit pure, that the self and the divine are identical, and thus self-knowledge is knowledge of God, and that humanity's problem is illusion and the need is for enlightenment rather than the problem being sin and the consequent need for repentance.
Pagels argues that orthodox Christianity proposes stranger ideas than gnosticism - strange ideas about God's goodness, the virgin birth, and resurrection. She suggests that orthodoxy only survived because of its social and political implications. She also suggests that gnosticism preceded orthodoxy, and thus should be considered as a viable alternative to orthodoxy. In other words, orthodoxy only exists because it aligned itself with dogmatism, patriarchalism, and political powers.
For her, the orthodox doctrine of bodily resurrection exists because "it legitimized a hierarchy of persons through whose authority all others must approach God" (27). Obviously, it could not exist because Jesus actually rose from the dead!
Gnosticism denies the full humanity of Jesus, and thus any real suffering - any real passion. Pagels argues that orthodoxy emphasized the passion of Christ in order to comfort and encourage people during physical persecution. Here as with resurrection, the truth is not in the event, but in social and/or political structures that privilege a certain interpretation. But must everything be reduced to the social and political? Is it a real stretch of the imagination to believe that the Christ events may be situated in reality and that the church preserved the truth by approaching everything with the central affirmation of the incarnation as the touchstone for truth?
Interestly, Pagels demonstrates how the full humanity of Jesus actually provides greater confort and encouragement to real human suffering than the gnostic message: "Here again, as we have seen, orthodox tradition implicitly affirms bodily experience as the central fact of human life. What one does physically--one eats and drinks, engages in sexual life or avoids it, saves one's life or gives it up--all are vital elements in one's religious development. But those gnostics who regarded the essential part of every person as the 'inner spirit' dismissed such physical experience, pleasurable or painful, as a distraction from spiritual reality--indeed, as an illusion. No wonder, then, that far more people identified with the orthodox portrait than with the 'bodiless spirit' of gnostic tradition. Not only the martyrs, but all Christians who have suffered for 2,000 years, who have feared and faced death, have found their experience validated in the story of the human Jesus" (101).
In Pagel's opinion, orthodoxy survives, not because it is true, but because of its social, political, and organizational compromises. She believes that the Christian tradition has been impoverished because "the process of establishing orthodoxy ruled out every other option" (149). However, the only other alternative is to have no orthodoxy whatsoever. Orthodoxy and gnosticism are so completely at odds that both cannot be true.
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